Mark Rydell

"From the moment Harry and Walter, a couple of small-time comics, turn to crime, the rollicking fun is non-stop"--Container.

A rancher (Wayne) hires 11 schoolboys to drive his cattle to market when the gold rush lures all the men away. Along the trail the boys learn how to do their job and become men.

Tom and Mae Garvey are struggling to keep their homestead safe from the local power authority who wants to flood their land. When Mae's former beau, Joe Wade, turns out to be in charge of the plan to acquire the property, tensions run high, climaxing in a devastating confrontation on the flooded river banks.

The lives of nine individuals fate begin to increasingly entwine in a web of addiction and gambling, culminating at one critical moment where their lives will be lost or reclaimed. Struggling writer Kate loses her family's savings at a casino; a washed-up Vegas performer tries to help Kate regain her money; Clyde owes so much money to his dangerous bookie that he asks his NBA-destined nephew to throw a game.

Shows the conflicts between three generations of the Thayers. The crotchety old professor and his wife spend their summer together on a lake in New England. The couple agrees to mind their estranged daughter's boyfriend's son, while the daughter and boyfriend go on a trip. The boy bonds with the old man in a way his daughter never did. Shows the terrors and graces of aging.

In The searchers, a Civil War veteran spends five years on the trail of a Comanche raiding party that kidnapped his dead brother's daughter. In Fort Apache, a calvary officer whose by-the-book tactics and ignorance of the western frontier cause him to lead his men into a fatal Apache ambush. In Rio Bravo, a Texas border sheriff fights off hired gunmen to keep a murderer in custody. In The cowboys, a rancher is deserted by his regular cattle drivers...